Mass layoffs at Atlanta-based CDC spread shock

The CDC employs about 13,000 people, the vast majority of them in metro Atlanta. The cuts, which account for about one-tenth of the agency’s workforce, were first reported by The Associated Press.

For one metro Atlanta resident and CDC worker, the email firing her landed with a “Good morning.” It was Saturday afternoon.

But it was no surprise, since the employee was within her first two years of employment at the CDC and news reports had been circulating that “probationary” employees would be axed. Her boss confirmed Friday the news was coming.

“I’m sad because I love my job,” said the woman, who asked not to be named out of fear her family would become an online target. “And I’m mad.”

The employee said she was working in the CDC’s Drug Free Communities program. She has high-level training and skills in rural public health communications, and her job was to work with local community coalitions across the country that couldn’t afford such a service on their own.

Her boss didn’t know much more about the firing than she did. Whereas her recent employment review gave her a spectacular 4.75 out of 5 rating, the employee said, the dismissal letter, which was shared with the AJC, said, “Unfortunately, the Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the Agency.”

Her firing, she said, was effective immediately.

President Trump has said he means to bring efficiency to the federal government and cut waste, fraud and abuse.

Cutting probationary positions across the board seems like “a blunt tool,” said Patrick Sullivan, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. After people are hired or promoted, they can be on probation for a year or so, during which their jobs have fewer legal protections.

Sullivan said that when cuts have happened in the past, there was usually a more surgical approach. Jobs with the most immediate health impacts were spared, such as the fast-response disease detectives that deploy at a moment’s notice across the country.

But as far as he knows, the entire incoming class of those Epidemic Intelligence Service workers who met the layoff criteria were issued termination letters.

“I worked at CDC for a long time. I hired people. I supervised people at CDC. There’s not a lot of fat. …” Sullivan said. “But this small piece, it has a really particular role that serves the states, serves the American public, in such a direct and urgent and specialized way that it seems very shortsighted to terminate this employment for these people just because they’re in the group who are able to be terminated easily.”

The New York Times reported early Tuesday that the Epidemic Intelligence Services workers, known as the “disease detectives,” were spared from the cuts, perhaps because of an uproar from alumni after a majority of its members were told Friday that they would be let go.

As news of the CDC cuts spread, Gov. Brian Kemp defended the efforts at efficiency.

He said Georgia has prioritized efficiency by not allowing government to grow like the federal government does. He said using technology has allowed the state to keep doing its job and still give raises to teachers, for example.

“I know they have some layoffs at the CDC and other things, but government can stand a little rightsizing,” Kemp said, when asked about the cuts by a Politico reporter while attending an international security conference in Munich.

Democrats rebuffed those comments, issuing a press release saying Kemp supported mass layoffs of Georgia workers. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Lithonia, represents the district the CDC sits in and called the CDC cuts reckless.

“This is yet another attempt by co-Presidents Musk and Trump to slash essential services at the expense of the American people while making room for billionaire tax breaks,” Johnson said in a written statement.

When the Atlanta CDC employee was fired, she was helping one rural community group retool their youth outreach program so it could effectively discourage tobacco and cannabis vaping. She’ll never finish that task.

The employee told the AJC, “If you want, like Gov. Kemp said, to reduce the government, fine. … But to be cruel and just cut people with no kind of regard for what you’re actually cutting, what’s the point in that other than to cause trauma among people? … That’s not real leadership to me.”